So many companies spend precious time and resources posting to social media several times a day. They saturate their feed with pictures, posts, and memes. But because there's no real rhyme or reason to their strategy, their social media presence fizzles out. Sound familiar?
While a common story for b2b, social media marketing can still be very effective. In fact, an impressive 84% of b2b executives use social media in their decision-making process. If you can be strategic about it and provide engaging, relevant content to the right audience, on the right platform, and at the right time, you’ll avoid the pitfalls of ‘maintaining a presence' and be seeing metrics that actually mean something.
So how do you avoid the ‘presence pitfalls’? Here, we’ll look at 3 signs that your current strategy isn’t working and give you some tips on how to fix it.
3 signs your current b2b social media strategy isn’t working
1. Leads are few and far between
Good content? Check. Regular scheduling? Check. Large following? Check. Leads?... *crickets*. In this case, your social channels are not optimised for lead generation.
For b2b brands, social media is so much more than a top-of-funnel tool that is designed to increase brand awareness. Look for opportunities further down the sales funnel as you convert brand awareness into action, whether that be getting registrations for a webinar on that uncovered topic or encouraging interactions with your online calculator.
Before you jump in, however, it’s probably smart to review what you’re looking for from each channel. Does your expectation correspond with your user’s buyer journey? Do they look for info on LinkedIn but convert on Facebook? Do they interact with your posts on Instagram but fill in a lead form on LinkedIn? Take a step back, and think through your strategy, ensuring it aligns with user behaviour for best results.
2. You’re attracting the wrong audience
It’s easy to think that any engagement is good engagement. If the numbers look good on paper, then your social media strategy must be working right? Not necessarily. A pretty good sign that you’ve got the wrong eyeballs on your content is when sales can’t make sense of the leads you’ve reeled in.
Another indication that your strategy needs some help is when the only people interacting with your posts are Sally and Sue from the sales team. Don’t get us wrong, employee advocacy is important, but you should be seeing some fresh faces in your notifications tab. (After all, your employees already know how great you are).
There are many companies that are blind to the deficiencies of their content strategy due to the traction it receives on social media. A good evaluation of the quality of your traffic is the number of visitors who actually convert to a lead, that is, your traffic to lead conversion rate. While success varies depending on the industry, a good percentage is around 3%. If yours is hovering around 1%, it’s likely that the people you’re attracting aren’t necessarily the right folk (of course, it could be a few other reasons, but do take a look at your content and personas first).
3. You’re posting the wrong content on the wrong platform
For many, social media is simply a place to post links to content they’ve created in the hopes that thousands will see it, click through and share it with their network. So, they have profiles on every network and flood the feed with line after line of self-promotion. Whilst this may have been a successful tactic in the early days, it doesn’t quite deliver results now.
